Attorney General Merrick B. Garland is the public face of the government’s unprecedented effort to identify, arrest, and prosecute those connected to the Jan. 6, 2021 protest at the Capitol. But the person handling the day-to-day management of one of the largest and most politically freighted efforts in the history of American law enforcement has largely flown under the radar: Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
An appointee of President Biden, Graves’ office has prosecuted at least 1,100 Jan. 6 defendants — including roughly 200 people so far this year. Republicans claim that the Justice Department’s steady pace of Jan. 6 arrests and Graves’ prosecutions aim to keep one of Biden’s animating narratives in the news — that, as the president put it, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”
The political nature of the Jan. 6 prosecutions is illustrated by the long partisan history of Graves and his wife, Fatima Goss Graves.
Partisan Plays
According to documents on file with the U.S. Senate, Matthew Graves, a registered Democrat, served as a domestic policy adviser to the Biden campaign in 2020. According to the questionnaire submitted for his Senate confirmation, he “assisted with Vice-Presidential vetting for the Kerry Campaign in 2004,” resulting in the nomination of John Edwards, well before an extramarital affair got wide attention and helped end Edwards’ 2008 presidential campaign. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington’s Democratic delegate to the House of Representatives, recommended Graves for his influential
